State of the Physique Address

I love progress photos, but especially seeing what kind of condition people can maintain long term. In case you’re similarly interested, here’s my own situation. I’ll include a few lifestyle details about what I’ve found works to build muscle and remain lean.

The Arrogance!

Clearly I’m no genetic anomaly, so what business do I have making a page like this? You’ve basically got kind of an ugly dude who under the right light with his sister’s t-shirt on looks like he might occasionally go to the gym* Not exactly impressive considering I’ve been training my whole adult life.

* Illustrating a post like this with a selfie he’s edited ten tons of hell out of? Really? He probably thinks he looks cool in that hipster hat, too.

Then

It’s more what I’ve managed to do in spite of having a body that naturally tends towards fatness—I met the criteria for obesity at my worst—and not being athletically gifted. This is how I used to look most of the time, between getting really fat, and crash dieting:

Now

But I found a better way to do things. For the last years I’ve been in the shape you can see in the next photo. It’s the first image on this page, but before I added the blue background and messed around with it. It’s just a changing room selfie I took when I was trying on a t-shirt in a department store.

Lifestyle

Ironically, the condition of the flabby before photo above involved a lot more work. My workouts were almost two hours and I ate at least six times per day, which involved a lot of food preparation and time. But despite the effort, achieving the look I was seeking eluded me.

These days I workout for half an hour at a time, and eat two or three meals per day as part of an intermittent fasting approach. Far less work, less hassle, less mental energy wasted, infinitely superior lifestyle.

And almost unbelievably to me considering where I’ve come from, I stay pretty lean. Obviously not bodybuilding stage shredded, but I’m happy.

To Conclude

No particular deep point with this. Perhaps it can be seen as a fair example of what you can do given a limited genetic hand. If you’re way out of shape and feel hopeless, it’s at least possible to find a workable way to considerably improve your physical state. And more importantly, maintain it over the long term as I’ve done.

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope it was interesting. Plenty more about fat loss here, and muscle building here.

All feedback and questions welcome, I’d love to hear from you—just use the comments box below or send me an email.

Stay Up To Date

If you like my art, please sign up to my newsletter to be notified of new work.